Saving Grace
by Tripfeldthemystic
Summary: When they're broken, they're tired, when the mask threatens to slip, when they can't pretend to go on any longer, they go to him. SuperWhoLock Omens.


**Saving Grace**

****_SuperWhoLock Omens. I own nothing._

* * *

They soldier on. Perhaps because they feel they have somewhere to get to, or they feel they would be letting someone down if they stopped, or perhaps they feel they don't deserve to stop and feel sorry for themselves, or perhaps it's just pride. Either way, that's all they do, is keep going. Through the difficult nights, the occasional tears, the losses, they just put one foot in front of the other. And that's how the universe works. For them, anyway.

But then, even for people so used to soldiering on (and on, and on), sometimes it gets to be too much. That's when they break.

And when they break, they feel like something behind their eyes is shattering and crunching up into bits, like their jaws are going to split and their hard-won frozen stare is going to splinter and burn up into a million degrees of pure screaming agony. That's what it feels like when a soldier breaks.

That's when they give up and stop soldiering on, and they go to one person. Because they don't trust anyone else, or they don't know anyone else, or maybe everyone else has told them that Maybe It Would Be Best If You Left Here And Never Came Back Ever Again.

Either way. There's only one person they know will help, or at least welcome them and give it a good try.

They go to him.

They all go to him.

* * *

Aziraphale the angel was sitting in the back room of his bookshop, sipping tea and carefully turning the pages of a very old book, when the bell jangled.

He looked up. The bell did not jangle very often, for the simple reason that people rarely noticed his bookshop enough to come in. Even so, he would have been prepared to take this in stride, except that he was reasonably sure that the sign on the door still said "closed" and the bookshop had still been locked from the inside.

Aziraphale stood up, very deliberately, set down his tea, closed the book, and emerged from the back room, peering around the corner to take in the tall, thin figure silhouetted against the door.

He couldn't say he had been expecting it, but then, that was all right. Some people he could welcome into his bookshop even with no notice.

"My dear," he said to the man who was leaning jauntily against one of the bookshelves. "I would have let you in if you'd asked..."

The man had a little metal thing clasped jauntily between his fingers, and an easygoing smile planted jauntily on his face, and a strange-looking hat perched jauntily on his head, and dark hair falling jauntily around his face, and a bowtie on his neck at a jauntily disheveled angle, and everything about him was so determinedly jaunty that he looked like he might just shatter into pieces at any moment.

"Hello, angel," he said lightly, twirling the metal thing in his hand. "Hadn't seen you in awhile - just thought I'd stop by, you know, to check in. How's the old bookshop?"

He was very good, Aziraphale noted. He always had been. He'd had a millennium of practice. But Aziraphale had been alive for a few millennia longer, long enough to recognize the warning signs when they were there.

"Really, Doctor," he said, in tones of mild disapproval. "You shouldn't expect to fool someone like me with a story like that. I _am_ an angel, you know."

The young man suddenly stopped looking so young. He managed to keep that jaunty damned smile in place for a few moments more before the pale mask slipped and threatened to break altogether. Aziraphale nodded, and then there were two cups of tea in his hands, one of which he handed to the Doctor.

"You must have left that infernal contraption of yours safe somewhere," he said, taking a sip of tea. "What is it you're calling them these days? Sounded like 'tartan'."

"TARDIS," the Doctor said, swiping his knuckles determinedly across his eyes. "Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Er. Listen, Aziraphale."

The angel raised his eyebrows, gazing at the Doctor over the rim of his teacup. "Yes?"

The Doctor straightened up. "I came to say good-bye," he said. It sounded like he was trying very hard to keep his voice steady. "That's why I came, is to say good-bye, as they've told me, and I haven't got much time, because I've known for awhile now that I'm going to - "

"No need for that sort of thing, now," Aziraphale said. He sighed, and handed a handkerchief to the Doctor. "Surely you can't be thinking of going quietly to your death, dear boy, that's quite unlike you. And you barely a millennium old. Now tell me what's going on here, and we'll see if we can't think of something."

The Doctor nodded, the panic in his eyes starting to fade. "Yes, quite right," he said, shoving the screwdriver into his coat and dabbing determinedly at his eyes with the handkerchief. "Very sorry."

"Oh, and Doctor?"

"Hmm? Yes, what?"

"Do cry if you must, there's a good chap. You'll give me a headache if you insist on bottling it up like that."

* * *

And then there was the other one. That had been a good deal harder, but then, he hadn't expected Aziraphale to fix it. He had merely wanted sympathy (an unusual thing for him, as he never really asked anything from anyone), which the Principality was able to provide. Aziraphale suspected there weren't many angels in heaven who would be terribly open and welcoming to this particular brand of pitiful.

"Take off your coat," Aziraphale ordered, wandering towards the back room, "and mind the books, they won't take well to mud."

The younger angel put the camel-hair coat on one of the wall hooks, next to Aziraphale's camel-hair coat. The only real difference was that the younger angel's coat was rather muddier and more crumpled, and larger, although somehow it still managed to look smaller, sort of like a drenched cat.

They sat opposite each other in the back room, the two cups of tea appearing as Aziraphale wished them into being. Aziraphale rested his elbows on the table, having cleared away some of the clutter so that the other angel had a place to put himself.

"Now," he said. "Not my Crowley, I trust."

The angel hesitated. "No," he said. "Not... _your_ Crowley."

Aziraphale blinked at him coolly from behind his spectacles, and then decided not to comment on the tone, or point out the hypocrisy of the same. "Well then," he said. "I know he's been helpful to you before, but do you think this is the best idea, conspiring with him? He _is _the king of hell, my dear, he's rather... politically minded."

The angel nodded, staring glumly into his tea, which he didn't touch. Aziraphale cleared his throat.

"Now, Castiel," he said gently. "What about the Winchesters? I imagine they could help."

Castiel shook his head once. "I can't go to them," he said. "They don't know. About any of this."

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. "Perhaps they should," he said. "I've never been particularly fond of them, myself - always rather rude, they were - but I'll give them this, they are competent."

Castiel remained silent for a moment, and then said, "It will be better, in the end, if I can just get the souls to defeat Raphael - "

Aziraphale cut him off with a look. "Really, now," he said in admonishing tones. "You think that will work? My dear, you haven't forgotten what lives in Purgatory, have you? They have strength which is rather beyond you, whether or not you'd like to admit it. Nothing personal, you understand."

Castiel stared down, and nodded slowly. Aziraphale nodded with him. "Reconsidering, are you?" he said. "Just remember that, on the whole, it will be better without him. More honest. There's Right and there's Wrong - sometimes, at least - well, that's the way of it, anyhow, and that's how it is here."

The other angel looked up, his blue eyes deeply pained. "He called me a whore, Aziraphale."

The Principality pressed his lips together and nodded sympathetically.

Castiel looked down. "I don't know what I am anymore."

Aziraphale considered for a moment, and then moved around to Castiel's side of the table; he nudged the angel's head down to rest on his shoulder.

"There, there," he sighed. Castiel's hands fisted in his sweater, trembling, and Aziraphale stroked the younger angel's dark hair. "You're still an angel, you know. We can still make this better." He went on, telling a few reassuring lies for good measure. "Evil sows the seeds of its own downfall and all that. More than just names for sides, good and evil, that's what I always say, of course. Now, let's think about this."

And Castiel took a deep breath, and held onto him, and - this was the extraordinary thing, or perhaps simply the sad thing, a desperate creature clinging onto his last desperate hope - believed him.

For a little while, at least.

* * *

It was the last one that was simply broken. From the moment he walked in the door.

It was raining outside - pouring, actually, a storm of slate-gray lashing the streets of Soho. Aziraphale had drawn the blinds of the bookshop and then gone into the back room and shut it off behind him, and consequently it took him a little longer to hear the persistent tapping on the front door.

When he opened the door, it was to a familiar man, rather short, drenched, lost-looking, and so full of despair that Aziraphale actually thought he could feel the hope being pulled out of the surrounding area. Not extraordinary like the others - this one was just human, which was fine. Aziraphale invited him in, and the man did his best to wring out his dripping jumper on the welcome mat; Aziraphale took pity and miracled the water away.

"Doctor Watson," he said, trying to tread cautiously in light of the obvious black hole of grief lingering around the man. "What brings you here, may I ask?"

John Watson gave a shiver, his eyes dark and hollow. "Sorry, Aziraphale," he said. "Really sorry, really, to drop in on you like this. But I - I didn't quite - know where else to go. I'm sorry."

"Don't be, dear boy," Aziraphale said lightly. "Come this way, come..."

For a moment, it was routine. Aziraphale sat him down in the back room, set cups of tea in front of both of them, and sat down opposite the human.

Now came the story. Aziraphale waited.

"I went to my therapist," John said, fiddling with the handle of his teacup. "But I - it didn't help. I'm not sure if..."

He trailed off, and Aziraphale nodded. "Go on," he said encouragingly. "What's happened to drag you all the way here from Central London?"

John Watson met Aziraphale's eyes. He looked tired. Dreadfully tired. Full of nightmares and grief and useless tears. "He's dead, Aziraphale," he said. "Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes, He's dead."

Aziraphale inclined his head. "Oh," he said. He recovered. "I'm so sorry, John."

John closed shaking fingers around his cup. "He fell off - jumped off," he corrected himself, "off the roof of St. Bart's. He was - he was on the phone with me, right before it happened. Telling me..." He trailed off, and then took a shaky breath and plunged on. "And I watched him throw the phone away and stretch out his arms, and, and just sort of fall off the ledge, and I was on the ground and I couldn't do anything but watch him fall..."

John Watson's voice cracked, and he laid his head down on his elbow and sobbed. Deeply, brokenly, like someone so shattered that he would never be able to put himself back together, or even pretend to go on.

Aziraphale reached across the table and clasped John's hand in his own. John clutched him hard, shoulders shaking, stammering out apologies between sobs, struggling even then to put himself back together, perhaps for some twisted sense of the angel's benefit. Aziraphale shook his head at him.

They stayed there, angel and man, the man dealing with nothing but the attack that his own mind was exacting on his body through his grief, the angel reflecting on the fact that some things, no matter how you looked at them, would not be turned around with a cup of tea and some ideas, not even with a few clever lies. Not even with the truth, which, he had a sense, was a far cry from what John Watson thought had happened.

Still - it was what he was here for.

* * *

"You've been talking to them again," Crowley accused.

Aziraphale looked up. "Hmm?"

"The humans. For Go - for hea - blast it all, angel, they come to you at their worst and you try and fix it even though you know you can't. Don't suppose you've thought about it that way."

"Things that are broken can be fixed," said Aziraphale virtuously, although he was a trifle miffed. He considered himself decently good at his job. Sometimes, anyway.

"Yeah, but some things can't be, and you always end up like this."

"Like what, pray?"

"Distracted, and a bit miserable," Crowley said. He noticed Aziraphale's expression, and sat down. "Listen, it's not that you _shouldn't_ talk to them, it's that you shouldn't expect things to get better just because you do, right? Talking someone out of suicide once doesn't make the problem go away, does it? And it can't take care of the whole situation, can it?"

Aziraphale rested his chin on his hand. "I thought I'd helped..."

"Sure," said Crowley. "But come on. That Doctor fellow - still thought dead, isn't he? Shot by a lake in the States. And the other angel, forget his name - "

"Castiel," said Aziraphale.

"Yes, that. He got better for awhile and then got a whole lot worse, didn't he. Wouldn't cut it off with the bloody demon, got himself in that whole mess with the Leviathans, and good job we're still alive, you and I. But he's well gone."

"John Watson," said Aziraphale, staring moodily into his tea.

"Hmm?"

"John Watson," he repeated, a little louder. "Sherlock Holmes's friend. He's all right. It took awhile, but he let it go eventually, you know. Got married, even. Lovely girl. Er."

Crowley didn't miss the hesitation - as though the angel had suddenly remembered something. "What?"

Aziraphale stayed still for a moment, and then drooped in defeat. "She's dead, his wife," he said, rather dully. "He didn't come to me about it, but I heard. He'll be all right though," he added valiantly. "He's always all right, really..."

"Well, there you go," Crowley said. "In that respect, you can't do it, can you, you can't take away all the horrible things about being human, like losing people. It doesn't work that way. There's got to be good and bad. _We_ know that."

Aziraphale was staring off into space, a little too blankly. It made Crowley nervous.

"Dinner?" he hedged.

"Not now, no. Thank you."

Crowley paused for a moment, and then reached behind his chair and pulled out a bottle of wine that hadn't been there a few moments ago. "Right," he said. "You need a drink, angel. And don't try and argue with me."

Aziraphale's eyes shifted lethargically over to focus on the demon's face. "I suppose I do," he said. "I'll probably just fall asleep, though."

"That's fine." Crowley filled two dusty glasses with wine and pushed one over to the angel. "Even the ethereal gets tired sometimes."

"That will be enough of that, thank you," said Aziraphale.

"All right, just trying to help."

The angel and the demon took a drink.

"Don't be too hard on yourself, is all," said Crowley awkwardly.

"I'm sure I won't," said Aziraphale, setting the glass back down.

He paused right then, tilting his head to the side. He drew up his shoulders. Crowley watched him.

"It's just so very difficult," the angel murmured.

Crowley pressed his lips together and obligingly pretended not to notice the expression on the angel's face. "Yeah," he said, refilling their glasses. "I know."

"Don't go rushing off, now," Aziraphale said halfheartedly.

"Don't worry."

"Not now."

"No problem."


End file.
